


Give The People What They Want

by prophetsong



Category: Queen (Band)
Genre: F/M, M/M, Slow Burn, assume i'll add tags as i go, but the band is very much a thing, im attempting to rival jane austen, like the slowest burn, no i will not elaborate on the timeframe, roger isnt in the band, set somewhere between 1968 and 1971
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-16
Updated: 2020-04-16
Packaged: 2021-03-01 22:14:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,129
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23684467
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prophetsong/pseuds/prophetsong
Summary: Roger didn’t notice as the man squinted, and spoke finally, breaking the silence in the room. “You’re the guy that said our drummer was shit.”Roger could only laugh in spite of himself, digging the heels of his shoes into the floor and avoiding meeting the other man’s eyes, realisation finally setting in of where he had recognised him from. “You must be the guy with the shit drummer then.”~Roger Taylor is pretty sure at this point that listening to and chatting shit about music is all he's good for. His saving grace from the repetitive cycle of attending lectures, making passing grades, and getting drunk finally came when running his mouth about a band to the right person managed to land him a gig writing music reviews for the student paper. This manages sends him on a path to the top, though, but when you get there, there's only one place left to go.Title refers to a 1981 album by The Kinks
Relationships: John Deacon/Roger Taylor, Roger Taylor (Queen)/Original Female Character(s), Roger Taylor (Queen)/Original Male Character(s)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 17





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> I intend for this to be a very long fic, I also intend for it to be good, so if updates are slow (they will be) assume I'm spending weeks editing a single paragraph (I will be). This is a slash fic involving John and Roger, I wont keep at as a surprise, but it will take a while to get there. For now, sit back, enjoy the prologue, take in the vibes, and listen to some good music.

It had been a while since a good band had played at the uni bar, and Roger knew it. He was there every week, often more than once, just trying to forget his assignments with shit beer and good music. But most of the time, the beer was better than the music, and that really was saying something.

He was sat up on a barstool drinking and moving his head slightly to the beat of the band playing. The music wasn’t bad, but it was hardly beneficial to whoever was on stage that Roger only let himself think this when he actively started listening. It was almost a philosophy of his to assume everyone playing was shit until proven otherwise. The drum beat was basic and the bassline was nothing short of embarrassing. He tapped his fingers against the wood of the bar next to his glass. The guitar was fast and loud, though, and if he liked anything it was fast and loud guitars.

Roger could distinctly remember three bands within the past year who only managed to pass his little test during one song, but since that was all, he hadn’t bothered to stick around to congratulate them on their mediocrity.

Maybe he was a cynic, who cared, cynicism would get you further than mindless optimism.

He hadn’t made it a secret to the bartender either, a friend of his, and the pair often found themselves talking as the nights wound down, when the music got loud enough for people to stop buying drinks. Roger would complain about the bands, the bartender would listen and smile, and they would both call it a friendship as Roger handed over his three shillings.

Whilst the music was above average, the night was going to go exactly the same as it always did; Roger was sat at the bar, two pints in and calling for a third, he had made eye contact with a pretty girl on the main floor, and he was pushing his studies to the furthest corner of his mind.

Hearing crap music on a Thursday night played by groups of teenagers that no one cared about was one reason he was glad he hadn’t pushed his own music career.

The song finished and the half-drunk students applauded politely around him. Even the bloke tending bar seemed to care. Roger looked down his glass, swirling the last of the beer around the bottom before tipping it back in one fluid motion.

He found the girl in the crowd; she beckoned him over, turning her back to him as the next song started and tipping her head slightly so that her hair fell further across her shoulder and down the length of her arm. Roger didn’t even need to be close to know she was probably high, biting her lip as she closed her eyes to take in more of the music, swaying softly to a heavy song. She didn’t flinch when she felt him come up behind her, and only tipped her head back against his chest. He was going to ask if she was enjoying the music and leaning in softly against her ear, but the sway of her hips didn’t slow under his hands so he could only laugh against the nape of her neck.

Without much thought, she turned her head to him over her shoulder and away from her hair. “I love your look,” she said, just above a whisper. Her eyes fell down across his chest and back up, hesitating at the lowest button done up on his shirt, and then again at his lips. The music seemed to slow around them but the bodies didn’t stop moving to the beat, so he just reciprocated the gesture, pushing his thumb higher on her waist, letting it slip underneath the hem of her shirt.

Roger had changed his mind on the evening; the band was shit, the beer was nothing better than average, but he’d be damned if he wasn’t going to have a good night.


	2. Roger

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was completely desperate to get something plot-wise out there. Also I lied in the last notes, it isn't going to be good, but it is going to be Something and that's what matters.

Roger knew he had strong opinions. It was probably the attribute which got him into the most trouble, but it always seemed to come out more when he was drunk.  
Over the years he’d been studying in London and visiting the bar he had made a home in, he’d made quite a habit of being over-dramatic, finding flaws in everything and everyone. But it was almost always about the music.

There are people, he’d found, that have interests, passions, something to keep them moving in a way that nothing else can. Everyone had something at some point, however fleeting, but never in his life had Roger met someone who could understand the way a rhythm lived in the deepest marrow of his bones, settled in his lowest ribs beneath his lungs. He would thrive off of the feeling of understanding it more like a language, and it would burn him up to know when all the music he had for company was the backwards drone of his lecturers.

One thing this did mean was that his record collection was practically obscene, and growing with every passing week. He wasn’t overtly pretentious about what he listened to, picking up any record he could get his hands on to play at any time, but the bubblegum pop hidden between The Kinks and The Hollies was more of a guilty pleasure. 

The most frustrating thing, Roger found, was that so much of the time he found himself alone in this. It wasn’t the loneliness that was painful; it was that no one else could hear the misshapen beat or the shift in tonality. And so his mindless complaints were lost to a sea of unthinking ears.   
Did this make him pretentious in a way that was practically intolerable? Of course it fucking did.

He didn’t play, though, hadn’t in a while. He had saved for months on end to buy the guitar that was now just collecting dust beside the boxes of records in his room. He had excuses, of course he had excuses, you don’t do an undergrad in biology, with prospects of getting a first, and still have time to practice your craft in music. And he never had the knack for it that he thought he did. It didn’t matter, because he still had it, he could still kick out a few chords if he wanted to.

Probably.

That was the reason he was in the pub more nights than not. Not because he had a drinking problem. Andrew would often joke about cutting him off with creases under his eyes and a glass under the tap.

The bartender was an easy friend to make. Roger was never not sat at the bar and it was always nicer to have someone on the listening end of his drunken rambling about the musicians. He wasn’t an easy man to please, but if all the garbage on the radio could manage it, why couldn’t a single band comprised of students.  
Oh, to be a teenager into music, he would think as he tipped back his glass and called for another.

*** 

Waking up on the wrong side of the bed seemed to only be a viable excuse when you knew which bed it was you were waking up in. As much as Roger hated waking up in a strangers bed, finding his clothes in the dark, trying to escape silently on the off-chance that whoever was in that bed with him wouldn’t hear, it meant he could spend the rest of his day knowing he’d already cocked up this rotation of the earth, so he needn’t try to carve himself into a better person just yet.

The bed wasn’t as big as he’d remembered it being the night before, and untangling himself from the warm body he seemed to be mixed up in was more difficult that he had hoped it would be, but he fell to the floor almost silently and began to pull on any item of clothing he could find.

He looked over his shoulder to see the back of the girl’s head, long hair messy against the pillows where he’d left her. Mostly, he just hoped she was still asleep. It wasn’t that he didn’t care about her, he was sure if something horrible happened he’d feel the same empathy he would for any one of his friends. Maybe not friends, classmates. Roger just didn’t think getting to a first name basis with everyone on campus was a necessity. They probably were already on a first name basis but fuck if he could remember that. 

He briefly considered, since she was sleeping, having a quick leaf through her wardrobe for anything that felt nice, but she’d been a good lay it would hardly be fair to rob her. Perhaps he could take something under the guise that he had seen it on the floor thinking it was his, and they’d laugh, go for a real date and fall in love and oh shit she’d woken up.

Roger turned to face the rustling sheets, pulling on the jacket he’d been wearing the night before, thanking his own morals for not trying to see what clothes she might not miss.

“Good morning, uh” she started, voice thick from sleeping as she pressed her back against the headboard, pulling the sheets up higher. She faltered slightly, as if going to address Roger by name, when he realised that she didn’t remember his either.   
Roger only had the courtesy to laugh, looking down as he pulled on his shoes. “It might not help but I don’t remember yours either,” he said, leaning back against the wall of her bedroom.

“No that’s not it I just,” she said, before hesitating.

Roger raised his eyebrows expectantly and pulled at his laces just out of his sight. 

“Do you want a cup of tea or anything?” She continued slowly, trailing off slightly towards the end.

“No no, don’t worry yourself about it, I’ve actually got a lecture in half an hour and I have no idea how far campus is from here so I’ll leave you to it.”

She laughed, still staying firmly beneath the sheets, she might’ve even started flirting again, tried to get him back in bed, if she didn’t think her flatmates were back, but she thought it best to just leave it be.

“Actually, now that we’re friends,” Roger started, pausing in the doorway of her room and leaning back in, “you wouldn’t mind me using your shower would you?”

Roger, despite still wearing the clothes he got drunk in the night before, was grateful for feeling clean beneath them and, making the walk to his first lecture became a little more bearable than it could have been. It didn’t wipe the slate clean for the day, but it was a start.

*** 

Roger’s life insufferably consisted of two means: company, and lack of.

The parameters of these varied, for example, he could spend night after night in a crowded bar (which he did) and still feel alone, or he could sit in the silence of his flat reading a letter from someone back home with promise of a pint when he returned. The loneliness was crippling, but unpredictable.

Middle ground was hard to come by here, and a balance was tricky to sustain, but every time the loneliness sank in he became more and more aware of the two states he existed in. He could map out his days into with or without. This he could live with, but there was that itch constantly in the back of his brain for something more. A little more than just to be with him, to know him.

The only times he would let himself think this was on surprisingly bad nights, nights when he left a girl’s house at some ungodly hour instead of waiting until morning, half a mind to go back out on the town and fall in love with a new stranger that he wouldn’t remember in the morning.

The sensation was easy to forget, the presence and lack thereof was a satisfying structure when he didn’t know he was living it. 

Here, it helped to have good friends, and a constant in his life for at least a year, filling presence where they might have been none, was Tim Staffell. Tim was one of the few people Roger felt he could talk to about music without them either killing him or dying of boredom themselves. Tim played so he got it at least a little.  
It was easy to talk to him. The pair had been friends for a while but each time they met up it would still take a while for Roger to become himself, shed his ‘cool’ guise and talk about whatever he was listening to that week. 

It was easier to talk to Tim than anyone he had known in a long time, Roger thought as they fell into step on opposing sides of a stand in the record store. He took a moment to appreciate that, his hand brushing against an LP he already owned, almost hearing Townshend’s guitars layered underneath Tim’s voice as he did so. Tim’s voice was nice, speaking or singing, and Roger let his mind drift to the first time he’d heard Tim’s band play. They hadn’t lasted long, and Tim was perusing other things now, but that just meant that Roger treasured the moments when he would hear Tim sing a little more. Not that he would ever let that slip.   
For the most part, Roger was just being existential in his account of his evening as he retold it all to Tim. Tim didn’t really give a shit about all of the girls Roger talked about, and wasn’t going to give a band the time of day if Roger didn’t like them. Their love of music wasn’t just something that held them together, it created a foundation for their relationship; the pair would joke about who had the better music taste or what was good and what wasn’t, but through the music they had an upmost trust of each other that just tended to bleed into everything else.

“Maybe you just need to like, settle down, get a girlfriend,” Tim responded, not looking to Roger but leafing through the records on his side of the stand.

Roger rolled his eyes and huffed as loudly as his dramatic little lungs would let him, knowing Tim wasn’t paying him enough attention. “That’s your big solution, yeah?” he scoffed, “just, what? Get married?” 

“Well isn’t this all because you want more than just sex?”

“Why would I need it? If I feel like doing the boring talking bit as well I’ve got you” Roger looked up over the selection of records to finally make eye contact with Tim who just rolled his eyes at the cheeky grin on his friend’s face.

“Well you’re not sleeping with me,” Tim pointed out, moving his attention back to the records.

Roger laughed and followed suit, turning his attention back to the records and feigning contemplation, “Hmm, you’re right about that,” he muttered, “But I’m perfectly content keeping my dick and my brain separate.”

Roger looked up when Tim didn’t respond, making a note of how Tim smiled to himself and the way he shook his head in disbelief. 

“Anyway,” Roger announced into the silence, pulling out a record at random to uphold the dramatic manner of his speaking, “I can hardly settle down when there’s still got to be at least a couple dozen girls on campus I haven’t slept with.”

This finally made Tim laugh properly, dropping his head as any tension that could be left his shoulders. Roger grinned back, sliding the record back onto the shelf as Tim looked back up at him. Talking to Tim was easy, because they’d only known each other for just over a year but Tim liked him, and Roger liked Tim back, so they were allowed to be dicks to each other and act like kids, because the important conversations came with time and made sure each of them knew their stories were in safe hands.

“And don’t forget a new lot of freshers every year,” Tim responded, his voice practically dripping with sarcasm and Roger had to hold back a laugh at how ridiculous he sounded.

“Wow, you’re an asshole.”

Tim just mumbled something that sounded like an approval as he moved on.

Roger took that as a sign to move on, and stopped as he watched Tim pull out a record he didn’t recognise, “Oh found something good?”

“Yeah, you been listening to the radio? New band, Zeppelin, not bad at all.”

Roger shrugged, “Think I might have heard of them yeah.”

“Yeah sort of, born out of the Yardbirds I think, but new singer, he’s good.”

“Oh, they were alright weren’t they, glad they’re making new music.”

“Friend of mine got me their second LP, listening to it not stop for weeks and been looking for their first one.”

Roger watched as Tim flipped the sleeve over, being drawn in by the album art, and only raising his eyebrows as a response when Tim fell out of his daze enough to notice he was being watched.

“I’m telling you these guys are gonna be big” 

“You said radio, aren’t they already big?”

“Yeah but these guys could be, like, big big,” Tim emphasised 

“Right okay you said Humpy Bong were going to be big”

“Okay and you are a prick who I am no longer buying a record,” Tim finalised, turning his back to Roger as he walked across the shop.

Roger couldn’t help grinning as he scrambled across the shop floor to catch up with Tim, “Nope no I take it back didn’t realise there was free music on the table.”

***

He could never fault getting to surround himself with people he could talk to, falling back against bodies in a bar or club with good basslines, but being alone, something good on his record player or radio and something good in his glass, sometimes that was just as gratifying.

Roger knew that at some point before he fell asleep he would have to get himself off of his bed to turn the machine off. He was so deep in thought he would barely notice the needle reaching the end of the side and the music stop filling the room.

Yes, there was a lot to be said for flirting with strangers and waking up to body heat beside his own, but the music would always be more important. He fell asleep thinking of the bar, thinking of the music more than anything else, the other distractions could wait.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> These are the Vibes. I'm not going to apologise for my Zeppelin tangent. See you all soon.
> 
> Again, if anyone's interested in beta reading, hit me up.

**Author's Note:**

> If anyone is interested in beta-reading for me, or just saying hi, you can find me on tumblr at prophetsongwrites.


End file.
